Is this the right thing to do?
on
TigerCloning
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· Score: 3
I'm not some kind of technology-fearing Luddite (as the fact that I read/. should prove) but IMHO this isn't the right thing to do. Why? Because as much as we might like to, you can't turn back the clock - a principle made abundently clear by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Whilst the original loss of the Tasmanian tiger was a tragedy it makes to sense to recreate the animals just to satisfy the collective guilt over the original incident. Times have changed, and there isn't a place for the tiger in modern Australia - shown by the fact that it was a dangerous menace which was hunted in the first place. Even if these scientists manage to recreate a viable population of them, where are they going to go? Back into the wild where circumstances will echo what happened in 1888?
There are valuable uses for medical technology like this, but attempting to correct the sins of the past isn't one of them. Like it or not, life follows a plan, and once something has happened we need to deal with it and move on.
Maybe this is where we'll find an everyday use for quantum computing - searching for files in this much data... since searching is one of the few things that a) we have an algorithm for and b) quantum computing does better than regular computers it could be used to search for data. Just a thought.
No, by advocating that we stop working for freedom at every level you are part of the Big Evil.
I never said that - what I said was that considering free software to be such an important issue cheapens more important freedom issues. It's great if you want to fight for free software, but it's just not as important as people here seem to think it is.
Let's say you, I and 8 other/.ers were in a house. The house is attacked by MS employees! They start beating on (or even pouring through) the front door. You are advocating a defense of "everyone to the front door"--but that leaves the back door unguarded. *I* am advocating a "man every station" approach that leaves our flanks protected. My method also means slightly less defense at the site of the (current) attack but which is worse: being outnumbered 3 to 1 at the front door or 1 to 0 at the back?
Errm, poor analogy. The front and back doors in your analogy should be for different, unconnected buildings. In which case, you could quite well decide to have everyone at the front door of the more important building, say a hospital, and leave the other, say a library.
... for as fine a collection of tautologies and empty platitudes as I've ever seen. So by caring more about real freedom issues rather than the "freedom" of a piece of software I become part of the Big Evil?
An increasing number of people today feel that the world ought to focus more on the freedom issues of free software rather than the technical or economical ones.
To be honest, I think this whole "freedom" issue as gotten waaay out of hand thanks to the nature of the net to allow like-minded people to reinforce each other's ideas. There is a huge difference between being able to vote and being able to change the code for a piece of software, and it cheapens the very real fight for freedom and democracy that is taking place in many countries across the world that people here are more concerned over whether software companies "get it" than whether military juntas butcher children in Africa.
Software is just software people. In the big wide world it just doesn't matter whether someone runs Linux or they run Windows 2000. Linux, and the whole free software "revolution" is not going to change the world into some utopian paradise. But by describing it in metaphors of struggle and revolution ("Men of Zeal" indeed!) it overstates the importance of a minor squabble over the right to have access to source code. Freedom is much more important than software.
Rather than donating money to the FSF, you'd be doing far more good for the world by donating it to organisations like the Red Cross who do real good for people who need it. There are people out there who don't know what software is, let alone have the time and resources to argue over esoteric points of view on it. They are the ones for whom freedom is an issue.
If everyone had adopted the "pragmatic" attitude as you suggested, linux would never have been written.
Why? Linus wrote it for himself, not for any other reason. Pragmatism had nothing to do with it really did it? IIRC, he wanted a free Unix system that ran on his 386. The success of Linux has been incidental to his original aim.
You don't give a rats ass about Linux, open source or "the community". You want to go in, rake whatever cash you can out of the mix and get out. And if it can help you MS stock go up a bit, so much the better
My, ad hominem attacks really prove your point don't they? FYI, I have nothing to do with Microsoft at all (although you probably won't believe me since that would make it easier) and I do like and use Linux, I just think the breed of zealotry you display does nothing for it.
Your reference to "Pseudo-communistic leader" gave the game away.
Whatever his personal politics are (not communist I believe), the aims of the GPL do bare similarities to the ideals of communism. It's not an attack unless you are some kind of rabid anti-communist.
Neither Linus nor Stallman needs advice from the likes of you.
What I was saying doesn't really touch Linus at all, and Stallman is not really responsible for the childishness displayed by some of his sycophants.
In fact, you are exactly the sort that the GPL was written to thwart.
What, people that like Linux? Please explain. I look foward to it.
Spoken like a true blinkered zealot
on
KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
So what about *BSD then? That code seems to have remained free without any help from Richard Stallman...
License wars are a waste of energy
on
KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 3
As someone who has worked with Microsoft's products almost exclusively over the last ten years but has recently come to appreciate the benefits of open source the sort of ideological arguments that occur in the open source community truly amaze me. I mean, there seems to be little difference between "free software" and "open source" and yet each concept has rabid followers which decry the opposition at every step.
Thanks to my handy Corel Linux distro I'm well on my way to becoming a Linux "guru". After installing it I tried each desktop and came to the conclusion that KDE is a lot smoother and efficient than Gnome was, and have since been using that. But I constantly hear people bewailing the fact that it's somehow "tainted" by the fact that a couple of words in the license don't match their Beloved Leader's psuedo-communistic writings. And then they go and try and create an entirely new product! So much for the idea of having the source encouraging "code reuse"!
As a consultant I can tell you that these issues seem rediculous and petty to outsiders. And they certainly add nothing to either the image or the quality of Linux, but instead cause resources to be squandered in duplicate efforts. As long as it works, why should the license matter so much? It's only software, it's not a matter of life and death.
To be perfectly honest, some of the rabid fanaticism that I see here just strikes me as childish. There's a real need to grow up in some people and get on with improving the code rather than slating the "opposition".
You're saying one kind of radioactive waste product is alright, but another isn't? Where do you draw the line... can we have a figure in say children with leukemia per square mile?
There have been a couple of times in the last year when I've wished to post to Advogato, but unfortunately I can't since I'm not "certified", no matter how important a point I was going to make.
As a working system Advogato encourages a level of "cliqueyness" (not a word I know) that a site like/. doesn't. I'm not saying trust models are wrong, but this is a real problem - how to build trust for unknown users without letting the idiots ruin it?
The trouble with the argument that technology is to blame for a lack of interest in politics is that these are issues that don't really have a direct causal connection - it's not fair to say that because technology is improving people are paying less and less attention to politics.
But, it cannot be argued that the increasing march of technology has, in general, turned people away from the old USian small community ideal where people knew all of their neighbours. Indeed, this is not so much a problem with the US, although its effects are seen here to a greater degree than anyone else (perhaps due to its corporate-orientated economy in which people tend to get pushed into second place), but it is a global problem that has been ongoing for centuries.
Technology has made us less and less able to relate to other people, and indeed to want to relate to them. In fact, whilst it has improved our conditions of living and made the transition from hunter-gatherer subsistance possible, it has also allowed us to concentrate on acquisitiveness at the cost of others, the roots of modern capitalism. And today, with the final death of any opposing systems, capitalism is seen as being somehow "right" for us. And capitalism is firmly linked to technology, made possible by such innovations as mass production.
Unfortunately in capitalism people are seen less as individuals with their own special contributions to make, than as parts of an assembly line, valued for little more than what they produce. Indeed, modern economics treats everything as capital, including people. Is it little wonder that people are disaffected and unhappy, when their sole worth is considered to be what they produce?
As people get less and less happy with their situation, they are of course going to become jaded and disullusioned. And politics is going to be seen as the root cause of this, since politicians have the perception of power, if not the substance.
Why would people care about politics in this situation? In fact, they're more likely to come to mistaken views about the evils of "Big Government" than the true evil - capitalism, and it's partner technology.
You should go research some facts, troll-man. Nuclear power is by far the safest form of power.
Are you trying to tell me that nuclear power is inherently better than say, solar power? Of course coal plants are dangerous and polluting, but they're on the way out in many places and about time too.
What you seem to be missing is that although the risks of an accident may be less than for coal, the consequences are much, much worse! This is why nuclear power is an evil which we should do without, because if something ever really goes wrong, it will be a disaster for a huge geographical area and the people that live there.
The possibilities for this invention in the field of law and order are huge, and we owe it to the hard-working police and security forces of the world to see it turned into an effective tool as quickly as possible.
After all, sniffer dogs, as effective as they can be. can only be used to do so much, and they have to be trained to alert their handlers to different smells. This device can just be programmed with a huge array of chemical "pictures" and used continuously instead.
In an age where FBI figures show an increase of about 12% each year in the amount of illegal high explosives seized, this kind of ultra-sensitive device is something we need.
I agree totally that if the FBI or the NSA want to have the ability to read people's email then they should be ones paying for it - to do otherwise is to reduce the ability of ISPs to compete in the market, which is to be avoided (unlike in the UK where the government couldn't seem to care less about how much ISPs are going to suffer from the costs of implemented their RIP bill). Given that these agencies have a considerable budget already I'm sure they can afford it.
But why do civil liberty groups feel the need to get involved in what is nothing more than a financial matter between ISPs and the agencies involved? Is it because they have finally realised that the average American would rather have this system in place than suffer continued terrorist violence and paedophile rings, and they are now trying to sneak such court cases in through the backdoor? Whenever politicians attach riders to bills with a completely unrelated and detrimental content people on/. are up in arms - how is this any different?
If these groups want to challenge measures such as Carnivore, then let them to it alone, rather than hanging on the coattails of a real court action.
The real trouble with pushing Linux onto the desktop market as quickly as possible is that the infrastructure required to develop games easily is still in the process of development. Why games? Because games are where mindshare is in the eyes of Joe Sixpack buying a PC for his kids. Sure, he may claim that it's for "educational purposes", but if it doesn't run games as well then he's not going to buy it.
Whilst the latest versions of XFree86 attempt to go further in what hardware is supported and what features can be used, there is still no unified framework for the kind of features required for games and other multimedia applications. Sure, there's OpenGL and now OpenAL, but these are very much a work in progress under Linux, and even then rely on the goodwill of manufacturers in making driver code available for a system where they won't be making any kind of return.
The reason that there are so many games under Windows is that it is, relatively speaking, easy to create them. DirectX provides a unified framework for integrating graphics, sound, music, input devices, network play and more in a single package, allowing designers to concentrate on what matters - the game itself. The difference is very real, and can be seen in the amount of time it takes for Loki to port a game to Linux.
It is safe to say that the importance of games cannot be stressed enough in the public's view of how desirable a desktop system is. And until Linux delivers a unified framework for creating games a la DirectX, it's success on the desktop will always be limited.
Unfortunately, since the task of creating workable and useful algorithms for quantum computers is still in its infancy, I very much doubt present day programmers will ever be able to sit in front on one and hack away at a piece of code. Quantum algorithms are very different from those we use in current computers.
As someone who has become passionately involved in the open source world of Linux and GNU, I can honestly say that what Linux requires in order to gain a decent amount of mindshare in the desktop market is a way to connect to the internet with the minimum possible hassle for the average user. This, despite the negative reactions often heard on this site, is AOL.
Whether you like it or not, Steve Case is a visionary, and without his influence in getting Mr and Mrs Sixpack onto the net it would have remained a backwater of ivory tower academia, without the public and commercial opportunties of today. After all, without AOL, how many of the dto-coms many of you work for would exist today? Not many, I can tell you.
Anyway, Linux does need to become more and more user friendly. I've been getting deep into its internals using my handy Corel Linux distribution, but this is probably requires a bit too much tech-savvy for Mr and Mrs Sixpack to use, especially for setting up the internet. AOL have the experiance in getting people onto the net no matter how much experiance they have, and if they decide to push Linux, it can only be a good thing.
As a consultant working in the field of b2b and b2c companies, I'm seeing many of the smaller outfits using Linux as a platform for their mission critical enterprise solutions. Unfortunately, this seems to be it's only real area of expertise in the eyes of customers - on the one hand they worry about its lack of scalability at the high-end, and on the other hand they worry that it's only for long-haired "gurus" with Grateful Dead T-shirts at the lower end. Much needed developments like this will take Linux's image away from pasty geeks and into the family home.
No matter your views on AOL, you can't deny that this is an important step towards the triumph of Linus Torveld's free software vision.
However, the important lesson here is that the foundations were set in stone and wrought from iron before any company had self-interested influence. TCP/IP (brought to you by research laboratories) is elegant and farsighted; it's taken thirty years for it to begin wearing thin. E-mail is similarly brought to you from academia. HTML, on the other hand, (as ultimately brought to you by Netscape and Microsoft) makes good engineers weep and gnash their teeth.
So, what about Delphi - designed and maintained by a single company for purely commercial interests? It has an elegent design which accepts new features as required, and has been updated over the years to fit new ideas without sacrificing backwards compatability or elegence.
And then there's C++ - a similar language that, whilst undoubtedly powerful, is maintained by a standards body which means that updating the langauge is a task with a duration measured in years.
Not all things under corporate control turn out poorly. HTML is not a good example.
I don't visit K5 much but it's intresting you've read so much on Slashdot about poverty considering Slashdot amd K5 are tech forums and poverty never comes up byond some fears that the poor don't have access to technology.
Of course, apart from the story "Poverty in America" which was on kuro5hin about a week before it went down. There was plenty of the kind of thing I'm talking about under that story.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we're just not intelligent enough to understand His plan. These things happen for a reason.
How do you create a working simulator without any data on the actual processes?
Because you know the principles behind it? This isn't guesswork you know. It's a logical progession of scientific knowledge.
Logically impossible in this case.
You were talking in general, so was I.
Yes it is. Hey! Making assertion without proof or reasoning is easy! I'm going to give up that "using logic and data" thing I've been doing.
Wow, could have fooled me!
... about attempts to clone mammoths are here and here. The second one was the first /. story I ever read IIRC. That takes me back... :)
... is here. I kid you not.
I'm not some kind of technology-fearing Luddite (as the fact that I read /. should prove) but IMHO this isn't the right thing to do. Why? Because as much as we might like to, you can't turn back the clock - a principle made abundently clear by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Whilst the original loss of the Tasmanian tiger was a tragedy it makes to sense to recreate the animals just to satisfy the collective guilt over the original incident. Times have changed, and there isn't a place for the tiger in modern Australia - shown by the fact that it was a dangerous menace which was hunted in the first place. Even if these scientists manage to recreate a viable population of them, where are they going to go? Back into the wild where circumstances will echo what happened in 1888?
There are valuable uses for medical technology like this, but attempting to correct the sins of the past isn't one of them. Like it or not, life follows a plan, and once something has happened we need to deal with it and move on.
There was an old /. article about it here.
Maybe this is where we'll find an everyday use for quantum computing - searching for files in this much data... since searching is one of the few things that a) we have an algorithm for and b) quantum computing does better than regular computers it could be used to search for data. Just a thought.
No, by advocating that we stop working for freedom at every level you are part of the Big Evil.
I never said that - what I said was that considering free software to be such an important issue cheapens more important freedom issues. It's great if you want to fight for free software, but it's just not as important as people here seem to think it is.
Let's say you, I and 8 other /.ers were in a house. The house is attacked by MS employees! They start beating on (or even pouring through) the front door. You are advocating a defense of "everyone to the front door"--but that leaves the back door unguarded. *I* am advocating a "man every station" approach that leaves our flanks protected. My method also means slightly less defense at the site of the (current) attack but which is worse: being outnumbered 3 to 1 at the front door or 1 to 0 at the back?
Errm, poor analogy. The front and back doors in your analogy should be for different, unconnected buildings. In which case, you could quite well decide to have everyone at the front door of the more important building, say a hospital, and leave the other, say a library.
... for as fine a collection of tautologies and empty platitudes as I've ever seen. So by caring more about real freedom issues rather than the "freedom" of a piece of software I become part of the Big Evil?
An increasing number of people today feel that the world ought to focus more on the freedom issues of free software rather than the technical or economical ones.
To be honest, I think this whole "freedom" issue as gotten waaay out of hand thanks to the nature of the net to allow like-minded people to reinforce each other's ideas. There is a huge difference between being able to vote and being able to change the code for a piece of software, and it cheapens the very real fight for freedom and democracy that is taking place in many countries across the world that people here are more concerned over whether software companies "get it" than whether military juntas butcher children in Africa.
Software is just software people. In the big wide world it just doesn't matter whether someone runs Linux or they run Windows 2000. Linux, and the whole free software "revolution" is not going to change the world into some utopian paradise. But by describing it in metaphors of struggle and revolution ("Men of Zeal" indeed!) it overstates the importance of a minor squabble over the right to have access to source code. Freedom is much more important than software.
Rather than donating money to the FSF, you'd be doing far more good for the world by donating it to organisations like the Red Cross who do real good for people who need it. There are people out there who don't know what software is, let alone have the time and resources to argue over esoteric points of view on it. They are the ones for whom freedom is an issue.
If everyone had adopted the "pragmatic" attitude as you suggested, linux would never have been written.
Why? Linus wrote it for himself, not for any other reason. Pragmatism had nothing to do with it really did it? IIRC, he wanted a free Unix system that ran on his 386. The success of Linux has been incidental to his original aim.
You don't give a rats ass about Linux, open source or "the community". You want to go in, rake whatever cash you can out of the mix and get out. And if it can help you MS stock go up a bit, so much the better
My, ad hominem attacks really prove your point don't they? FYI, I have nothing to do with Microsoft at all (although you probably won't believe me since that would make it easier) and I do like and use Linux, I just think the breed of zealotry you display does nothing for it.
Your reference to "Pseudo-communistic leader" gave the game away.
Whatever his personal politics are (not communist I believe), the aims of the GPL do bare similarities to the ideals of communism. It's not an attack unless you are some kind of rabid anti-communist.
Neither Linus nor Stallman needs advice from the likes of you.
What I was saying doesn't really touch Linus at all, and Stallman is not really responsible for the childishness displayed by some of his sycophants.
In fact, you are exactly the sort that the GPL was written to thwart.
What, people that like Linux? Please explain. I look foward to it.
So what about *BSD then? That code seems to have remained free without any help from Richard Stallman...
As someone who has worked with Microsoft's products almost exclusively over the last ten years but has recently come to appreciate the benefits of open source the sort of ideological arguments that occur in the open source community truly amaze me. I mean, there seems to be little difference between "free software" and "open source" and yet each concept has rabid followers which decry the opposition at every step.
Thanks to my handy Corel Linux distro I'm well on my way to becoming a Linux "guru". After installing it I tried each desktop and came to the conclusion that KDE is a lot smoother and efficient than Gnome was, and have since been using that. But I constantly hear people bewailing the fact that it's somehow "tainted" by the fact that a couple of words in the license don't match their Beloved Leader's psuedo-communistic writings. And then they go and try and create an entirely new product! So much for the idea of having the source encouraging "code reuse"!
As a consultant I can tell you that these issues seem rediculous and petty to outsiders. And they certainly add nothing to either the image or the quality of Linux, but instead cause resources to be squandered in duplicate efforts. As long as it works, why should the license matter so much? It's only software, it's not a matter of life and death.
To be perfectly honest, some of the rabid fanaticism that I see here just strikes me as childish. There's a real need to grow up in some people and get on with improving the code rather than slating the "opposition".
You're saying one kind of radioactive waste product is alright, but another isn't? Where do you draw the line... can we have a figure in say children with leukemia per square mile?
There have been a couple of times in the last year when I've wished to post to Advogato, but unfortunately I can't since I'm not "certified", no matter how important a point I was going to make.
As a working system Advogato encourages a level of "cliqueyness" (not a word I know) that a site like /. doesn't. I'm not saying trust models are wrong, but this is a real problem - how to build trust for unknown users without letting the idiots ruin it?
The trouble with the argument that technology is to blame for a lack of interest in politics is that these are issues that don't really have a direct causal connection - it's not fair to say that because technology is improving people are paying less and less attention to politics.
But, it cannot be argued that the increasing march of technology has, in general, turned people away from the old USian small community ideal where people knew all of their neighbours. Indeed, this is not so much a problem with the US, although its effects are seen here to a greater degree than anyone else (perhaps due to its corporate-orientated economy in which people tend to get pushed into second place), but it is a global problem that has been ongoing for centuries.
Technology has made us less and less able to relate to other people, and indeed to want to relate to them. In fact, whilst it has improved our conditions of living and made the transition from hunter-gatherer subsistance possible, it has also allowed us to concentrate on acquisitiveness at the cost of others, the roots of modern capitalism. And today, with the final death of any opposing systems, capitalism is seen as being somehow "right" for us. And capitalism is firmly linked to technology, made possible by such innovations as mass production.
Unfortunately in capitalism people are seen less as individuals with their own special contributions to make, than as parts of an assembly line, valued for little more than what they produce. Indeed, modern economics treats everything as capital, including people. Is it little wonder that people are disaffected and unhappy, when their sole worth is considered to be what they produce?
As people get less and less happy with their situation, they are of course going to become jaded and disullusioned. And politics is going to be seen as the root cause of this, since politicians have the perception of power, if not the substance.
Why would people care about politics in this situation? In fact, they're more likely to come to mistaken views about the evils of "Big Government" than the true evil - capitalism, and it's partner technology.
You should go research some facts, troll-man. Nuclear power is by far the safest form of power.
Are you trying to tell me that nuclear power is inherently better than say, solar power? Of course coal plants are dangerous and polluting, but they're on the way out in many places and about time too.
What you seem to be missing is that although the risks of an accident may be less than for coal, the consequences are much, much worse! This is why nuclear power is an evil which we should do without, because if something ever really goes wrong, it will be a disaster for a huge geographical area and the people that live there.
The possibilities for this invention in the field of law and order are huge, and we owe it to the hard-working police and security forces of the world to see it turned into an effective tool as quickly as possible.
After all, sniffer dogs, as effective as they can be. can only be used to do so much, and they have to be trained to alert their handlers to different smells. This device can just be programmed with a huge array of chemical "pictures" and used continuously instead.
In an age where FBI figures show an increase of about 12% each year in the amount of illegal high explosives seized, this kind of ultra-sensitive device is something we need.
I agree totally that if the FBI or the NSA want to have the ability to read people's email then they should be ones paying for it - to do otherwise is to reduce the ability of ISPs to compete in the market, which is to be avoided (unlike in the UK where the government couldn't seem to care less about how much ISPs are going to suffer from the costs of implemented their RIP bill). Given that these agencies have a considerable budget already I'm sure they can afford it.
But why do civil liberty groups feel the need to get involved in what is nothing more than a financial matter between ISPs and the agencies involved? Is it because they have finally realised that the average American would rather have this system in place than suffer continued terrorist violence and paedophile rings, and they are now trying to sneak such court cases in through the backdoor? Whenever politicians attach riders to bills with a completely unrelated and detrimental content people on /. are up in arms - how is this any different?
If these groups want to challenge measures such as Carnivore, then let them to it alone, rather than hanging on the coattails of a real court action.
The real trouble with pushing Linux onto the desktop market as quickly as possible is that the infrastructure required to develop games easily is still in the process of development. Why games? Because games are where mindshare is in the eyes of Joe Sixpack buying a PC for his kids. Sure, he may claim that it's for "educational purposes", but if it doesn't run games as well then he's not going to buy it.
Whilst the latest versions of XFree86 attempt to go further in what hardware is supported and what features can be used, there is still no unified framework for the kind of features required for games and other multimedia applications. Sure, there's OpenGL and now OpenAL, but these are very much a work in progress under Linux, and even then rely on the goodwill of manufacturers in making driver code available for a system where they won't be making any kind of return.
The reason that there are so many games under Windows is that it is, relatively speaking, easy to create them. DirectX provides a unified framework for integrating graphics, sound, music, input devices, network play and more in a single package, allowing designers to concentrate on what matters - the game itself. The difference is very real, and can be seen in the amount of time it takes for Loki to port a game to Linux.
It is safe to say that the importance of games cannot be stressed enough in the public's view of how desirable a desktop system is. And until Linux delivers a unified framework for creating games a la DirectX, it's success on the desktop will always be limited.
Unfortunately, since the task of creating workable and useful algorithms for quantum computers is still in its infancy, I very much doubt present day programmers will ever be able to sit in front on one and hack away at a piece of code. Quantum algorithms are very different from those we use in current computers.
See QUIC at CalTech or the Centre for Quantum Computation at Oxford for more information on quantum algorithms.
... I figured it'd be a lot safer than heroin... :)
As someone who has become passionately involved in the open source world of Linux and GNU, I can honestly say that what Linux requires in order to gain a decent amount of mindshare in the desktop market is a way to connect to the internet with the minimum possible hassle for the average user. This, despite the negative reactions often heard on this site, is AOL.
Whether you like it or not, Steve Case is a visionary, and without his influence in getting Mr and Mrs Sixpack onto the net it would have remained a backwater of ivory tower academia, without the public and commercial opportunties of today. After all, without AOL, how many of the dto-coms many of you work for would exist today? Not many, I can tell you.
Anyway, Linux does need to become more and more user friendly. I've been getting deep into its internals using my handy Corel Linux distribution, but this is probably requires a bit too much tech-savvy for Mr and Mrs Sixpack to use, especially for setting up the internet. AOL have the experiance in getting people onto the net no matter how much experiance they have, and if they decide to push Linux, it can only be a good thing.
As a consultant working in the field of b2b and b2c companies, I'm seeing many of the smaller outfits using Linux as a platform for their mission critical enterprise solutions. Unfortunately, this seems to be it's only real area of expertise in the eyes of customers - on the one hand they worry about its lack of scalability at the high-end, and on the other hand they worry that it's only for long-haired "gurus" with Grateful Dead T-shirts at the lower end. Much needed developments like this will take Linux's image away from pasty geeks and into the family home.
No matter your views on AOL, you can't deny that this is an important step towards the triumph of Linus Torveld's free software vision.
However, the important lesson here is that the foundations were set in stone and wrought from iron before any company had self-interested influence. TCP/IP (brought to you by research laboratories) is elegant and farsighted; it's taken thirty years for it to begin wearing thin. E-mail is similarly brought to you from academia. HTML, on the other hand, (as ultimately brought to you by Netscape and Microsoft) makes good engineers weep and gnash their teeth.
So, what about Delphi - designed and maintained by a single company for purely commercial interests? It has an elegent design which accepts new features as required, and has been updated over the years to fit new ideas without sacrificing backwards compatability or elegence.
And then there's C++ - a similar language that, whilst undoubtedly powerful, is maintained by a standards body which means that updating the langauge is a task with a duration measured in years.
Not all things under corporate control turn out poorly. HTML is not a good example.
I don't visit K5 much but it's intresting you've read so much on Slashdot about poverty considering Slashdot amd K5 are tech forums and poverty never comes up byond some fears that the poor don't have access to technology.
Of course, apart from the story "Poverty in America" which was on kuro5hin about a week before it went down. There was plenty of the kind of thing I'm talking about under that story.